Border Pedagogy in the Age of Postmodernism

Within the last two decades, the varied discourses known as postmodernism have exercised strong influence on the nature of intellectual life both in and out of the university. As form of cultural criticism, postmodernism has challenged number of assumptions central to the discourse of modernism. These include modernism's reliance on metaphysical notions of the subject, its advocacy of science, technology, and rationality as the foundation for equating change with progress, its ethnocentric equation of history with the triumphs of European Civilization, and its globalizing view that the industrialized Western countries constitute a legitimate center unique and superior position from which to establish control and to determine hierarchies (Richard, 1987/1988, p. 6). From the postmodernist perspective, modernism's claim to authority partly serves to privilege Western, patriarchal culture, on the one hand, while simultaneously repressing and marginalizing the voices of those who have been deemed subordinate and/or subjected to relations of oppression because of their color, class, ethnicity, race, or cultural and social capital. In postmodernist terms, the political map of modernism is one in which the voice of the other is consigned to the margins of existence, recognition, and possibility. At its best, critical postmodernism wants to redraw the map of modernism so as to effect shift in power from the privileged and the powerful to those groups struggling to gain measure of control over their lives in what is increasingly becoming world marked by logic of disintegration (Dews, 1987). Postmodernism not only makes visible the ways in which domination is being prefigured and redrawn, it also points to the shifting configurations of power, knowledge, space, and time that characterize world that is at once more global and more differentiated. One important aspect of postmodernism is its recognition that, as we move into the 21st century, we find ourselves no longer constrained by modern-